My life on the borderlands.

Tag Archives: sex

I’ve spent most of my sixty-five years of life looking for a person, doctrine, or organization that I could build my life around. I started out looking to my parents to fulfill this role. I found early on that I could depend upon my father to provide us with shelter, clothing, food, and the luxuries of upper middle class Anglo life, but that he was largely unavailable emotionally and could not protect me from my abusive older brother. My mother I found I could depend upon to provide me with delicious meals, delightful books, affection, and consolation, except when her alcoholism and borderline personality disorder symptoms turned her manipulative, vindictive, and sexually abusive.

For years I felt torn between the two of them, and my ambivalence took an odd turn.

Mother put pressure on me to choose her over my father, which—let’s be frank—it wasn’t hard to do, given his loud, gritted-teeth complaints, self-isolation, and demands for absolute obedience. But I liked the fact that he was a writer, and I think I sensed his self-loathing, and I identified with him more than I liked to admit at the time. Now in the bedroom they shared, my father slept on the left side of the bed, my mother on the right. So at night I felt torn. If I slept on the left side of my bed, would I be symbolically choosing my father over my mother? If I slept on the right side of my bed, would I be symbolically choosing my mother over my father? So I compromised: I taught myself to sleep flat on my back, a habit I tend to follow to this day.

Once I entered adolescence, I more or less gave up trying to find refuge in my parents’ world and I sought refuge in my private dream world of comic books, science fiction, fantasy, mythology, and chaste fantasies of joining Robin Hood’s band of Merry Men, or being adopted as innocent school mascot by my brother Anthony’s Air Force Academy classmates. When I became aware of my homosexuality, I began fantasizing about finding a Mister Right, the perfect man who, in exchange for my exclusive devotion and access to my body, would console, protect, and give shape and direction to the rest of my life.

The problem was that, owing to incest trauma, I felt sex was dirty—not just homosexuality, but all sex. I got this feeling from my mother. So I decided that I did not want to be sexual at all. After my father’s sudden death in early 1971, I sought out the sexuality-free surrogate family I’d always fantasized about: I became a celibate Fundamentalist Christian for seven years.

The people with whom I worshiped were good people, genuinely trying to live by Jesus’s teachings of love and forgiveness. Although my self-betrayal ate away at me, the love and acceptance they showed me had a healing effect on me. They gave me a refuge from the storm of my life. But in the end I left the church, and Fundamentalism, in large part because I felt I had been putting on an act. Though I was indeed celibate for most of the seven years I was with them, I now know the difference between celibacy, born of lifestyle conviction, and sexual anorexia born of abuse trauma. And I was not the only one who left. Several years ago I discovered that the pastor of the last church I attended had been gay, and had committed suicide because he had not been able to reconcile his faith with his physicality.

All this took place many decades ago. Today, at 65 years old, five feet seven inches tall, and 290 pounds, I am far from healed; I like to joke that I have more issues than National Geographic. But I have a renewed faith in Divine Love, from Whose womb I was born and to Whose womb I shall return, and for Whom my homosexuality is a natural species variation, not a monstrosity or a curse worthy of damnation. And I have been fortunate in meeting numerous fellow travelers, straight, gay, in between, and undecided, whose kindness has consistently reached out to me in dark times.

So if you are tempted to give up who you are to get love, don’t give in to that temptation. Start asking for help, and keep on asking until you start getting it. It can and does get better, but only if you refuse to let your abusers win. •

Whenever two persons meet in physical reality, there is the opportunity of shared experience. Sharing experience with another conscious entity is a basic drive in all physicalized beings, or “becomings” as one New Age commentator might put it (Mr. Rand winces at this neologism). Which kind of experience is shared depends upon the consciousness-level of the participants and their premanifestation agreements. In some cases the shared experience is sexual in nature.

Joining with another conscious entity is a passion intrinsic to humanness. On the Plane of Light and Sound, our term for the level of reality that is home to the human spirit, two entities meet, merge light-forms completely, absorb all of the others’ stored experiences (and vice versa), then part, each possessed of full knowledge of how it is like to be that other person, perceived as that person itself and not as an outsider. This level of intimacy is sometimes achieved through or as a byproduct of human sexual expression. Some religions, fearful of God’s wrath, condemn the body as intrinsically evil, and the body’s natural impulses as intrinsically shameful. Our experience is that the body’s impulses are neither good nor evil, they simply are. It is the level of consciousness through which they are expressed that determines their moral quality.

There has historically been much effort put into Western culture by way of analyzing, dissecting, and determining the structure and variants of human sexuality. In ancient times, some forms of human sexuality were condoned that modern people would naturally condemn: in ancient Rome, the paterfamilias or head male of the family possessed the legal right to beat, rape, and kill his wife, children, and slaves, because the law viewed wife, children, and slaves as the possessions of the paterfamilias. Non-consensual sex is now recognized as an expression of the restricted consciousness-level we call To Force and To Be Forced; as such, it is unacceptable as a societal norm. And many religions would agree with this assessment we have made.

Many religions vilify certain kinds of sexual behavior: homosexuality being one of the chief targets of their wrath. This is largely because [from the viewpoint of the heterosexual observer] homosexuality appears to blur gender roles and gender-behavior lines. Western culture has its roots in militaristic culture, and in most militaristic human cultures, the gender roles are strongly divided or distinctive, and deviations from them are seen as a threat to the power hierarchy at the core of militaristic culture. For the same reason, cross-dressing, gender-neutral dress or behavior, [and] transsexualism are also condemned in militaristic cultures. Yet from our viewpoint in the nonphysical, none of these forms that human sexuality takes possess intrinsic moral value, whether negative or positive. Everything depends upon the level of consciousness with which the sexuality is expressed.

Sexuality is necessary for reproduction, but that is not now and never was its sole purpose. It is through our bodies that we experience the rhythms of spacetime itself: its ebbs and flows, its scents, its textures, its flavors, its sounds. Enjoying one’s body and its capacities for pleasure is one of the gifts that wayfarers on the Earth plane are granted to help ease their progress here. •

Welcome to the New Year! I thought I’d run by you my first-ever poll on which topics you’d like to see explored on this blog during the next year. Vote for as many as you like! There’s even a space at the end for you to suggest a topic not covered above. When you’re done, just click on the VOTE button on the bottom right of the poll. Here goes….

In physical reality, things change. This is both the gift of physical reality and its curse. Only in physical reality (and its immediate support structure, thought reality) can sadness, grief, pain, fear, hatred, anger, and envy be experienced, for only in these realities is the consciousness so frameworked that it can only with difficulty maintain awareness of its immortality and abundant nature.

Such awareness limiting frameworks are necessary in order to keep the self focused in space-time. For spacetime is the most highly energetic of all realities, and thus takes the greatest concentration to focus upon. The plane of the One, on the other hand, where there is no differentiation and no change, is utter stillness and calm. The only effort required to focus upon the plane of the One is to simply let go completely.

Wandering through space-time, the self encounters many individuals who enrich and challenge its assumptions about reality. Such a person was karl Deke Von Uhl, a gentleman of Mr. Rand’s acquaintance who last night began his transition from identification with his physical self: that is, he died. The vectors that helped him die were AIDS and cancer, and he was attended by his longtime partner, Todd Parker.

Why do we mention these men here in this context? Mr Rand did not, after all, know either of them well. Mr Karl he had known in Santa Fe as a client and then, much later, as a friend; Mr Todd he has not met at all. Yet last night’s transition triggered in Mr Rand a desire to know why, given all Mr Rand’s experiences as a psychic and channeler with worlds of the unseen, he still fears death? And why, when he has sensed Mr Karl’s energies around him, more alive than ever albeit not physical, part of himself is still saddened?

Grieving the death of a loved one is not a betrayal of spiritual insight, but a natural human animal reaction to loss of continued experience of the loved one’s voice, touch, scent, breath, body. Wedded as he is to a noble animal body, Mr Rand is outfitted with an ego whose job it is to keep him in spacetime long enough for the balance of the multiverse to be maintained. One of the tools the ego employs towards this end is sex. Mr Rand thought that Mr Karl was very sexy, and although there was never sexual contact between them, for Mr Karl was partnered and had sexual tastes differing from those of Mr Rand, Mr Karl embodied the Tarot Essence called the Emperor, the most physical of all the faces of the Divine. And Emperor Essence individuals have the root chakra as their central chakra, which means that sex is usually very important to them. More than sex, Mr Karl was passionate about the sensual beauty of life: his lover’s body, the power of music (he was a professional musician), art, literature. The ugliness of life he also found beautiful, and embraced.

Mr Rand admired these powerful life energies in Mr Karl as much as he admired Mr Karl’s physical form. And so, since Mr Rand has always struggled with loathing of sexuality and physicality, the few interactions he had with Mr Karl always imbued him with fresh sense of enthusiasm for spacetime experience.

In the last weeks of Mr Karl’s earthly experience in his body, Mr Rand was privileged to offer Mr Karl spiritual and emotional support through Mr Karl’s transition process. In this Mr Rand was balancing his inability to offer such support to his lover Stuart “Alex” Lucker, who left physical reality by his own hand in 1988. Mr Todd was happy to allow Mr Rand access to Mr Karl and last night thanked Mr Rand for his encouragement.

Where is Karl Deke Von Uhl now? He is in the process of expanding the awareness of himself from physical reality through thought reality and into the causal plane or physical planning state, where he will become aware of his entire life just completed and will review how that life added, or did not add, to the balance of his experience as a whole. When Mr Karl has completed this process, he will choose whether to adopt a new physical persona or to remain in the nonphysical (or both). Should he choose to adopt a new physical persona, Mr Karl, the Emperor, will take on a new set of clothes, whether it be in the physical universe Mr Todd and Mr Rand presently occupy or some other. And so the multiversal balance will continue to be fulfilled.

Yet for Mr Todd, and for Mr Rand to a lesser extent, there is grief; and not only for them, but for hundreds of other individuals whose lives Mr Karl touched and challenged and enriched. So although Mr Karl did not complete the great works of writing he envisioned as his purpose, he left many fine writings behind him; and more than this, he gave a visceral life-affirming love to many who knew him. And so in no sense can Mr Karl’s life just past be considered any kind of a waste.

And so, Mr Karl, warrior and poet, live long and prosper; and in the light reaches thou shalt become music until the Earth summons you back into Her embrace once more. And we thank you for sharing. •

Books like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus focus on the differences between men and women. Undeniably, biology and brain structures influence gendered thinking and behavior. Even more so does upbringing and the culture to which one belongs. But I believe that men and women possess an older nature than maleness or femaleness, a nature as accessible to the conscious mind as any script written by biology and society in the human brain.

This deeper nature is usually presented in iconography as that of the Divine Androgyne (AN-dro-jine, from the Greek words for “man” and “woman”). Sometimes the Androgyne is described as possessing the primary and secondary sex characteristics of both a male and a female. However, I see the Androgyne differently: neither as a hermaphrodite nor as a genderless neuter. To me, the Divine Androgyne is the fount from which both gender and nongender spring.

The Androgyne combines all qualities we tend to think of as contrasting or opposite: yin and yang, light and shadow, life and nonlife, in-ness and out-ness, receptivity and aggression, stillness and action, intuition and reason, place and nonplace, form and formlessness. In the Divine Androgyne, male and female exist in perfect complement, just as my guides, the Family, claim each human soul coexists in our original spiritual home, the plane of light and sound.

What is the plane of light and sound like? The Family describes it as a state of perfect loving communion in which no violation is possible. In this state, entities who wish to share essence with one another merge completely, exchanging their entire experience of themselves with one another, hiding nothing (for there is no shame there) and keeping nothing back (because there is no fear there). Then the entities part, each carrying within itself the total experience of the other.

Most human visions of Heaven, whether as a place of sensual delight or a place of purity and praise, may derive from unconscious or superconscious awareness of the plane of light and sound, a plane within which our essential selves still reside.

How can I experience such Heaven on Earth? I do not know for certain. By I do know that one step towards such perfect communion is to dwell not on the differences between us, but on our similarities. The closest thing to a She in physical reality is a He, and vice versa; each mirrors something in the other, and both are contained within each. Perhaps, if I ask sincerely, the Divine Androgyne will help me comprehend this core reality before my time in this body is done.

I have, let’s be frank, spent much of my life waiting for Mister Right to come walking through my front door to sweep me off my feet. If my client notes are any indication, most of you secretly nurse an equivalent fantasy. Of the five top kinds of questions posed to me by clients—love, career, family, wellness, spiritual growth—love has always headed the list, ever since I started doing professional readings back in the 1980s.

Many clients are embarrassed to ask about love matters. They usually leave such queries for last, and pose them almost apologetically, even offhandedly, not wishing to appear too needy. “I suppose I may as well ask about my love life,” they say, or, “I guess everybody asks you this, right?” Well, yes. Everybody does. So stop being embarrassed. There are no stupid questions. (Actually, there is one stupid question: “So how’s your weight loss program going, Rand?” This is stupid because my answer is always the same: “Fine.” People who ask such questions deserve to be fibbed to.)

Underlying love questions is usually the hope, if not the belief, that there is somebody out there who is ideally suited to me, somebody I am fated to meet some day when I am truly ready. But what do I mean by “ideally suited”? Always sexually compatible? Always emotionally supportive? Always financially generous? Always intellectually stimulating? Always available for companionship activities? Always spiritually aware?

What I usually mean by “someone ideally suited to me” is “Someone who is wholly delightful to me at all times while being wholly supportive of me even at my worst.”

Now presumably, if such a person were my Mister Right, than I would be his. But can I honestly believe that I am capable of being wholly delightful and supportive to a partner at all times—even at my worst? I think not. And neither, I venture to say, can you.

The fact is, fantasies of Mister Right—or his sister, Ms. Right—are simply drugs to help us avoid learning to love real flawed people in real flawed life. So to paraphrase a Buddhist saying: When next you meet Mister Right on the road, kill him.

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About Rand B. Lee, The Rational Psychic

Since the mid-1980s Rand B. Lee has served an international clientele as a professional psychic specializing in life-purpose, career, love, wellness, relationships, spiritual development, prosperity, recovery, the Tarot and trancework. Rand works with individuals, couples, and groups in person, over the telephone, or via Skype.